


deux fois béni

by decoying



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Eventual Smut, M/M, Multi, Pining, longing and yearning the usual
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27889837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decoying/pseuds/decoying
Summary: “I’ve got a message for you, as it turns out.”“Do you, now?” Achilles says, at length. He takes in the state of him, and seems to draw some pained, laborious conclusion. (Or perhaps he’s lost some long-fought, attritional battle.) Zagreus is only able to breathe again when he decides: “Let’s have it, then.”
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Hades Video Game), Achilles/Patroclus/Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Achilles/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 209





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the classic "hey patroclus here's a message from achilles (SMOOCH)"........ but make it angsty
> 
> (do all men kill the things they do not love?  
> the quality of mercy is not strain'd  
> it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven  
> upon the place beneath: it is _twice blest_  
>  it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.)  
> —merchant of venice

Mirrors don’t agree with Achilles anymore.

He keeps the newest addition to the west hall solid at his back, careful not to turn around and catch sight of himself. Besides the fact that if he squints, he can see a shadow of the back wall through his reflection—something else needles.

Nothing is right about the face he wears in death. 

It doesn’t hold the proper weariness; only a ghost of it colors his infinitely drawn, shuddered expression. There’s no proof of an endless trickle of longing and worry carving valleys through his cheeks. Some things deserve to be weathered. Men like him have earned an eternity of eroding away. As it is, age will never catch up with him here. There will never be lines to count and measure his folly or wisdom, no way to tell if he’s learned a single solitary thing standing guard in this House.

If the man left doomed to wait for him in paradise could see him he would witness not growth, but a fresh rose plucked too soon from its stem, vibrant and sweet-smelling and not nearly as withered as it should be.

This is eternal youth, aye?

A reward Achilles not only wasted, but scorned. 

The true deserving recipient of that gift— _ah._ Out of his thoughts he’s drawn when he hears a splash. The skittering of scorched feet on tile. And then there he stands, the son of Hades, as he stops to pat the rightmost head of a particularly generous hellhound. He turns heel, watery blood trickling down his collarbone to disappear into his chiton. And _oh,_ Achilles truly has learned nothing, because he cannot tear his eyes away.

All that his lover would say for him yearning after another. It wouldn’t be the first time—not for either of them. A lifetime ago, he would have welcomed it. They would have shared their spoils. But after all this time, Achilles is not sure his waning heart can bear one more sin that needs atoning. 

Achilles is wandering through the chambers of his head again, his lonely voice echoing off the cavernous walls.

There in the hallway, Zagreus waits patiently for invitation. His green eye shines, his red eye shadowed, but both are open as a fresh scroll, crisply unrolled and waiting to be read or written.

“All right, lad?” says Achilles, his tired voice a whisper, a specter, a shade.

He smiles, and handsome dimples are the only canyons that crease his face. And if anyone deserves to bathe in the fountain of youth and never gain so much as a wrinkle of worry, by the gods, it’s Zagreus.

“Didn’t mean to disturb you, sir,” he says. “I have some more nectar that I hope you’ll take off my hands.”

Zagreus, with so much affection to give, he’s no mere bubbling fountain; he is a sprawling sea, a roaring ocean, mighty and powerful, only gentle when and because he wants to be, refusing to be drowned by the harsh world but instead, his tide has all the more risen for it.

“I was hoping we spar a round, afterwards,” he says, no shyness in his petition, no caution to his optimism. “I could use the practice, if that’s all right.”

And Achilles, he’s looked at what he can’t touch long enough.

With a futility akin to Sisyhpus and his boulder, Achilles says, “I’m... sorry lad. I need some time.”

Heart stitched to his tunic, pressed along his mouth, glistening in his eyes. 

Zagreus’s voice is so unbearably full when he says, “What... exactly do you mean, sir?” 

He offers himself so freely for the rejection that Achilles hardly has the heart to oblige. The tide that rushes up to meet him urges to comfort, to soothe, to disarm.

“It’s only that… I’ve nothing left to teach you,” he amends, sacrificing any sure-footing. A softened blow, only to prime for the killing one he must deliver. “There... comes a time when the student outgrows his master.”

“What? No—” says Zagreus, pitching forward, mismatched eyes glittering brightly as gems, rare and coveted by so many. Achilles among them.

Gods, there is so much naked want in his heart, can he let it overflow? Is it ever fair? To Zagreus, to himself, to his beloved? (A name, he finds, that he hardly has the courage to speak anymore. Is it cowardice? If he could anymore taste, he’s sure the shame of betrayal would coat his tongue like sour wine.)

“Please, lad. It’s all right. There’s no need to—”

“Surely there’s more for me to learn,” he says, urgency threading a jagged line through his voice. He is a patchwork of deep emotion, neatly sewn together and worn only inside-out. “And even if there isn’t—I would still train under you, sir. Please.”

He has no weight to rest upon his spear. Even so, it feels about to buckle.

When he smiles, regret bleeds out like a stab wound, deep and very likely mortal.

“I have sworn few oaths in my lifetime," he murmurs, downy-soft and nearly to himself. "You tempt me to add one more.”

“Is it… is this about—?”

“There’s nothing to be done,” Achilles cuts in, quickly, before he can say it. “Now go. See to your father, all right?”

Zagreus bites his lip, a determined set to his features that Achilles is too weary to be warned by.

“I’ll be back, sir,” he says, so earnest it heats the air. “Take care of yourself a bit longer.”

* * *

By the faint smell of singed grass is he pulled out of a particularly cruel reverie. 

The acrid smoke cloys until, as every time before, it is overcome by the soothing balm of freshly bloomed flowers. Patroclus knows not when it became so familiar—nor when he began to want for it. At this rate, the carpet of it will be more white than green. (Perhaps he is looking forward to that day.)

But when the footsteps draw close and the shadow is cast, all its eagerness spreading wide to fill up every inch of the chamber, Patroclus steels himself against the poison of hope. He does not look up.

“What is it this time, stranger?”

As ever, there is no backing down for this one.

“It’s about your Achilles,” he offers, and may as well lay the name at his feet for all its reverence. “He’s—there’s something he, ah, wanted you to have.”

And when Patroclus finally lifts his eyes, what a look it is—the prince is _bashful_. A lovely color on him, really. Brings out the burning hope in those mismatched eyes.

And Patroclus truly is a man left to do nothing but want for a veritable eternity. 

It’s an invitation when he asks, “Oh?”

The air between them doesn’t stir. But something passes, all the same.

Smart lad, he takes the hint he’s given.

And with no further preamble the godling is kneeling in his space, one warm palm, he assumes it’s warm, fitting over his bare shoulder. His face is knotted in a concentration that only serves to tangle him further, so visibly determined to get this right.

And _this_ is him pitching forward, warm lips, he hopes they’re warm, pressing so feather-soft that he’s like to a shade himself, contrasting the grip traveling down his bicep, holding him in place, grounding him to hell and earth and Olympus alike, until Patroclus can do nothing but sit there and be kissed.

A wonderful kiss, at that. A _unique_ kiss. The like of which Patroclus has not felt from another, because it belongs invariably to him.

The lad’s had lessons, he’s sure. But not with any man Patroclus has known.

When he pulls himself away, it is with effort. The anticipation on his face is so open, so fragile, so ready to be broken that the cruelest whisper in his mind dares him to take the opportunity.

“He sent that, did he?” Patroclus wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Liar.”

Zagreus draws back, stinging red blood pooling deep in his cheeks, a dam that has splintered and begun to flood.

“Well, he—he didn’t, exactly.” 

The same son of Hades who fought his way through hell to get here, half-dead and with at least seven circles left to go—he flits his odd eyes away. He scratches the nape of his neck like a chastised schoolboy a millennium his junior. 

“Apologies, sir, really. I didn’t mean to trick you. I was only hoping to—”

“You were meddling, stranger.”

Patroclus strings up arrows into his gaze. He pierces straight and true, and the lad looks thoroughly and dejectedly cut.

Patroclus searches himself, and after the looking, he finds that the expression does not suit him. Perhaps he does prefer the hope—perhaps more, he seeks to indulge it.

If this man is under his lover’s tutelage, then there is undoubtedly want of him to be under something else. And if Patroclus knows him still in death, then the great warrior, the great fool, he hasn’t moved a perfectly sculpted muscle to make that happen. 

Patroclus has half a mind to show the lad how his master really _would_ kiss.

Much and more than half, in fact.

“Well, it’s done now, isn’t it? No point in you going back to him empty-handed,” he decides, watching trepidation seep into every drop of the godling’s mortal blood. “Especially if the prideful sod won’t strike first. We both know he wants to, don’t we? Always was slow, that one.”

“Sir—?” Zagreus starts, but does not draw away further, and that’s just fine with Patroclus. “I don’t quite—mmph— _oh.”_

He sighs into his mouth, and it’s not long before a river of godly blood flows somewhere much more useful.

Of all the lessons the prince has been taught, Patroclus is determined that his will be well-remembered. Well enough, he dares hope, for a more than capable godling to take back to his (—and, he suspects, not only his—) beloved Achilles.

* * *

Out of the pool, Zagreus leaves a trail of blood and fire straight into the west hall. He passes an empty courtyard and desk, and that’s all fine with him. There’s only one man he needs to see right now. Faithful at his post, Zagreus meets his eyes and lifts a hand in greeting. 

“Hey, sir,” he says, his voice as steady as the river boatman ferrying another lost soul into eternity.

Achilles acknowledges him with a small smile, pulled taut as thread.

“Hello, lad. How was it this time?”

Zagreus takes a breath, and, as taught, he does not hesitate. 

“I’ve got a message for you, as it turns out.”

The House is still around them. The air does not stir, but something passes, all the same. 

In the mirror behind his post, Zagreus sees his hair and clothes, just eskew enough to be a proposition all their own.

And Achilles, he wasn’t born yesterday.

“Do you, now?” he says, at length. He takes in the state of him, and seems to draw some pained, laborious conclusion. (Or perhaps he’s lost some long-fought, attritious battle.) Zagreus is only able to breathe again when he decides: “Let’s have it, then.”

Zagreus allows a smile to break on his face, inevitable as his own escape, as dawn over Poseidon’s mighty oceans upon the surface.

“It’s a rather long one,” he says, one last chance.

There’s a rare apprehension in the shift of his feet, the pull of his lip between teeth. “I suppose... it’s due time for a break, isn’t it?” Achilles allows, and Zagreus dares not scorn the weight of it. 

In his chambers, the carpet is not as soft as rolling grasses. The elaborate furnishings are no fragrant flowers, and the gentle glow of the mirror does nothing to rival the verdant glimmer of Elysium’s sprawling plains. Perhaps… it’s all right. A little improvising never hurt, did it?

Untangling him from the knot of his own thoughts, Achilles says his name. 

“Come then, Zagreus,” he urges, shedding his trepidation for so much naked want. “Out with it.”

Zagreus takes one more breath, but, as taught—he does not hesitate.

Low in his throat, he says, “Your Patroclus sends his regards.”

And at the sound of his name, great Achilles, mover of worlds, shaker of foundations, slayer of gods—his knees nearly buckle where he stands.

“He wants you to have this,” Zagreus murmurs, firmly enough to keep him standing. “And Achilles… so do I.”

He cups his cheek, he rests a hand on his shoulder.

And he starts from the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this actually started out as smut but then i wanted to make achilles sad so... sorry for the blue balls. tune in next time to fix that


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You love him,” says Zagreus, plainly, just to say it.   
> “I do,” says Achilles.  
> “He loves you,” he says, his smile crooked and dopey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> who's gonna tell achilles you can love two people at once smh (he knows, dw)

The lips on his could be no one else’s. The heat radiates from Zagreus, licked from his feet to spread through them both, wild as a burning forest. His hands wander. Frantic, he strips them both to bare chests. 

Achilles closes his eyes, because he hardly needs them. There’s a draw to him. A sweet scent, like those dark flowers that lure blind insects in by fragrance alone. 

The words tumble out from a deep part of him, cracking and rusted from years in their hiding place. “Lad, I—you should know, how long—”

Zagreus’s reply comes much easier. “Me too, sir.”

Zagreus tames the rush as best he can. He's more careful than Achilles has ever seen him; afraid to send him to flight, and Achilles can’t blame him. Something culls, fluttering beneath his ribs; but it’s easy to ignore, a warm stir of interest swirling in his belly from Zagreus’s incessant hands, tracing every shape and mapping every muscle, as if to redraw them later from memory. Which—he will, Achilles thinks, if he tells him so, and he shivers with something edging past pleasant, turning left of center. His kisses are deep and encouraging, with a practiced edge, a ghost, a whisper, a proof of—

And then, sudden as a bolt with no thunder, a torrid flush of shame as he traces over the scars. There, and there, and there. How it rises from pleasantly warm until it’s only sticky, only hot and hard to breathe, like a summer with no breeze.

It’s suffocating. Not in the way he’d long hoped to drown, when he first drank deep of his charge. 

And then, worse then, Zagreus touches his back. He traces along a puckered star of raised flesh, pink as raw meat, and the effect is instant. It’s a thing that takes you back to so many places at once, your body pulled in too many directions, with a tug like brambles on snagged skin. He’d meant his fingers to be gentle, to soothe. Achilles can’t bear it. He grabs his wrist, gentler than the memory grabbed him, and there’s three green eyes, one red, all on each other. 

Any expression he wears is beautiful. This one, where confusion slips to dawning sadness—it’s beautiful too, and Achilles would do most anything to never see it again.

The man isn’t simple. He doesn’t need to be told. He drops his hands. 

“...I understand, sir.”

He draws back. Achilles has a moment of panic and steps forward, and fills the space again.

He smooths at his hair, taming its wildness. “It’s not you, my boy. It is not you.”

“I was hoping I could—his message was rather specific, you know. I’m told you’d like it very much.”

His smile is wry, and salvaging. His interest hasn’t gone, and Achilles can’t lie and say his has either. The evidence is plain, straining and insistent through the folds of his robes.

A mirrored smile tugs at his mouth, unconsciously. “...Still leaves no room for argument, I see.” Still doesn’t know how.

“You love him,” says Zagreus, plainly, just to say it. 

“I do.”

“He loves you,” he says, his smile crooked and dopey. He doesn’t understand why this would be a deterrent. Achilles’ lover gave the message, after all—so why should it be?

An ache spreads. A plague to whatever it touches, sprawling and inescapable as the midnight sky. In that moment, he aches for everything he’s ever lost, and he grieves for what he has, for the day he may lose them, too.

“Can I kiss you again, sir?”

And there’s the waiting, his very heart suspended in all that prickling silence, wanting only to be acknowledged.

There’s a tangling, a jumbling, a bundle of emotion too knotted and wound that it’s not to be saved. Not to be delicately undone. The only option is to be cut out.

Zagreus must see this on his face when he does not answer, panic slashing through.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“No, lad,” Achilles says, voice strained. “It was my mistake.”

A blow would have been worse, for all that he flinches backward.

Achilles knows a war when he sees one. The hurt plain on his face, it lays siege to his heart, barreling across his chest only to call a bitter stalemate. Achilles doesn’t _want_ this, to dole out such rejection. Not to _Zagreus._ His body would shake with it, if he was alive and whole.

He has seldom been barred from what he wanted; the memories of those few times are precise as a spear, refusing to be dulled with so much time and use. They cut sharp as a new forge, salty ocean water rushing in to sting him ever worse.

Zagreus retreats backwards, face wet and weeping, an open wound. 

“I understand,” he says again, heavy with finality, and Achilles wishes that he would fight.

When he’s gone, all that’s left is the fever-chill of his absence, and Achilles is left alone twice over.

* * *

“Patroclus, sir—if you could… If you could only _show_ him.”

He’s pacing up and down the bars of his own prison cell. Such a thing can exist in paradise; Patroclus knows well. His every round leaves the grasses singed in a black line, left to grow up more white-specked flowers, only to burn and regrow again. 

Patroclus peers at him, hawk-sharp eyes swooping up and over. 

“He still wants me, does he?”

The dejected set of his shoulders does the prince no favors for his height. His face is pinched with deep rejection. All the breath he has blows out at once.

“You’re all he wants,” says the godling, soft as first snow.

A laugh, then. Short and sharp, but not at all unkind. Patroclus almost slaps a hand on his knee, rolls around in the sweet grasses like they did as boys, it’s so absurd.

“I have seen you,” is what he says, and a puzzle rearranges the prince’s face. 

“I... don’t understand, sir.”

“I have seen you,” he says again, plainly. “I know my Achilles has also. Don’t let him fool you, stranger, and don’t let him use me as his excuse. He will come to me one day, you’ll see to that.” _He is half my soul, as the poets say._ Patroclus’ doubt is years gone, now. With the boy’s help, that is. _He will come._ “Until then…” he tilts his head like a considering bird. “I have another message, if you are inclined to receive it. And give it, as it were.”

Two mismatched eyes stare wide, stunned, showing off their uncanny difference. He kneels, curious and willing, and Patroclus leans closer, bracing his weight over another prince.

“It’s recipient is willing,” he adds, kindly. “I can promise you that. Are you?”

His emotions change as the seasons do; quickly, and with bounding relief. The lad smiles; an open, breaking thing, suffused with warmth. Patroclus always heard of Nyx’s darkness, heavy as a cresting wave and covering all the Underworld. But how could this be, when within it live two suns?

“Of course, sir.”

He leans in, and their lips crush breaths to gasps. 

The kiss is not from Achilles, and nothing like him; but Patroclus finds that it is more than suitable in the time between. And then, if the boy is persistent, it will be for his Achilles as well. (And perhaps again with the two of them, in the time after.)

This time, he does not need to guide his hand down. 

From an exile to a godling; and from a godling, his lesson goes on to a long-remembered legend.

* * *

When Zagreus breaks the surface of the river Styx, he does not swim to shore. He wades in it for a while, its current thin and miry, banishing the memory of another swift death. His thoughts bleed into the water, dripping enough to overflow, to flood up and wet his father’s feet. 

Another message.

One that will be well received.

He can do it this time. It’s not his skill, for that he has plenty; he’s not self-conscious and he’s not unsure. He hardly knows how to be. What floats around him now, pruning his skin with worry, is the deep-cut dread of another rejection from a man he’s wanted longer than he can remember.

Patroclus had laughed so sure and sharp, the dismissal of his fears soothed a line down the planes of Zagreus’s back. _I have seen you._ His eyebrow raised. _I know my Achilles has also._ He stated it surely as fact, and Zagreus took it for the compliment it was. For the comfort it was. 

There’s no reason to sit anymore in spilled blood and worry. He hoists himself out, and flicks them both from his skin. 

Achilles meets his eyes with effort, their deep green hoisting sadness like heavy weight.

He keeps a polite distance. He greets him: “Sir.”

“Another message, I’m guessing.” He says it toneless. Carefully so. Holding back, like a dam against a great river. There’s so much of it, isn’t there?

A smile pulls his face crooked. 

“One he’d very much like you to receive, sir. Myself as well. But, Achilles…” his face is wide and earnest, searching for invitation, for permission. “Only if you want it from both of us.”

Achilles works his jaw. Zagreus can see the concentration etching lines into his handsome face.

He turns to his room, feeling those considering eyes on him all the time.

He sits on his bed, and waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just finished tsoa and am now a changed man so i had to write more of this or die. achilles wants this i promise he's just going THROUGH it (also sorry for the blue balls AGAIN i am bound by law to make this smut at some point)

**Author's Note:**

> this actually started out as smut but then i wanted to make achilles sad so... sorry for the blue balls. tune in next time to fix that


End file.
